13 Pop Culture Characters Who Were Inspired By Donald Trump

Decades before the election, Hollywood turned Donald Trump into a stock character type. Here's where he popped up.

Those of us who grew up in the 1990s are still experiencing a good deal of cognitive dissonance over the person who currently resides in the White House. Donald Trump was, to many of us, nothing more than a pop culture figure for many years. His self-aggrandizing appearances in movies like Home Alone 2: Lost in New York as well as a kind of weird Pizza Hut commercial pretty much assured that no one of a certain age was able to take Donald Trump seriously. He was spoofed in MAD Magazine, and endlessly namecheked in countless films and TV shows; I even recall his name once being used as a punchline in the short-lived UPN sitcom Platypus Man.

But some where along the line, the pop culture clown somehow shed his buffoon image, gained a good deal of positive political clout among a good deal of Americans, and gained traction as a viable candidate. In 2016, as you may have read, Donald Trump barely squeaked out a presidential victory. Who knew?

Of course, the president has been present within the pop firmament pretty constantly since his first break into the public consciousness in the 1980s. He has became such a well-known character “type” that screenwriters and filmmakers have constructed various spoofs and analogues of him with something approaching a regularity. Indeed, even before the inception of Celebrity Apprentice, the word “Trump” was more often used to describe a stock character than an actual person.

For those who have been taking stock of that stock character, you may have seen him the the following places…